Secret image sharing (SIS), as one of the applications of information theory in information security protection, has been widely used in many areas, such as blockchain, identity authentication and distributed cloud storage. In traditional secret image sharing schemes, noise-like shadows introduce difficulties into shadow management and increase the risk of attacks. Meaningful secret image sharing is thus proposed to solve these problems. Previous meaningful SIS schemes have employed steganography to hide shares into cover images, and their covers are always binary images. These schemes usually include pixel expansion and low visual quality shadows. To improve the shadow quality, we design a meaningful secret image sharing scheme with saliency detection. Saliency detection is used to determine the salient regions of cover images. In our proposed scheme, we improve the quality of salient regions that are sensitive to the human vision system. In this way, we obtain meaningful shadows with better visual quality. Experiment results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Keywords: meaningful shadows; polynomial-based SIS; random elements utilization model; saliency detection; secret image sharing; statistical correlation.